Paw-sitive PR for Birmingham Dogs Home
How we generated THOUSANDS of donations for Birmingham Dogs Home using the power of PR.
Challenge
To drive empathy and support for Birmingham Dogs Home at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Located just a stone’s throw away from our city-centre pad, Birmingham Dogs Home has been rescuing and rehoming dogs in the West Midlands for almost 100 years. Sadly, when the coronavirus pandemic struck, their normal income streams were cut — including their annual fun day — and they urgently needed a fresh way to engage their loyal supporters and new audiences.
The charity turned to the online community of dog lovers, and their ‘Paws-itivity month’ idea was born. Being Birmingham Dogs Homes’ first digital campaign, Leopard Co teamed up with our four-legged neighbours to help make the digital PR activity an online success using our pet sector knowledge.
Solution
We understood that the charity already had a loyal following of supporters, but there was opportunity to showcase their charity to a new audience
We helped the Birmingham Dogs Home team to identify key influencers in the Birmingham area, to recruit them into the campaign to amplify the message and gain their endorsement. ‘Paws-itivity packs’ were sent to local canine influencers — featuring bandanas, homemade doggy cakes, and other branded goodies — to give the influencers a talking point to help engage their followers with the campaign.
To maximise the visual impact, Leopard Co’s design team worked with the charity to create an eye-catching logo for the campaign and a sharable calendar of the month’s activities.
Impact
- Nearly £4,000 of vital support raised
- New regular giving sign ups — securing £1,300 annual income
- 50,599 new website users — up 73% from previous month
- Video views 7.9K, an increase of 1,165% on Facebook
- 100 new Twitter followers
- 1,000 new Instagram followers
The Leopard Co team were fundamental in helping us make our first ever digital campaign a real success. Leopard Co helped make our content work for us as hard as possible, guiding us to work with influencers and companies that supported and shared our values and spread the word about our activities across their networks, raising awareness for our charity into new audiences. Their design team captured our theme with eye-catching graphics, which really appealed to our supporters, and we used the branding across everything we did in August, to pull together the different elements of the campaign — on T-shirts, advertising, and all of our digital output. We can’t thank the Leopard Co team enough for all of their energy, skills, and enthusiasm — helping to keep us ‘paws-itive’ and keep tails wagging during tricky times for our sector.Head of Fundraising at Birmingham Dogs Home